Tuesday, October 11, 2016

The JAWZ of war against mice

My ammunition dump.

I open the silverware drawer and notice little black grains
and wonder who dropped dirt among the forks. Bits of bacon? Wild rice? Not mice
feces again!

The glories of fall with cool temps and blazing trees must
alert rodents it’s time to find a winter home, and with our entire tribe in tow,
why don’t we enter this promising house with a perfect entrance through the
kitchen exhaust fan? Why not? Because I am going to tell people how to stop you!

Mice, I admit, are rather cute with their shiny black eyes
and fuzzy gray faces. No one knew this better than children’s author Beatrix Potter
who wrote mouse stories that could warm the most cold-hearted adult. Who
doesn’t love Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca, the mouse couple who angrily destroy a
doll house because all the food is fake but then return in repentance with a
broom and dustpan to sweep up the damage? If only!!

I’m not afraid of them, like some, or viciously calculating
like others armed with a cookie sheet ready to flatten it the next time it
appears. (Futile remedy, Andene.) Okay, I did have one encounter that made me
scream. But I was in no position to protect myself since it ran under the
bathroom door while I was temporarily indisposed.

If you see one mouse run across your living room and
disappear under the chair, you may be sure there are others. If you find one
dropping in your pantry, you may be sure there are others. If you find a cache
of shredded kleenix behind the shoes in your closet, you may be sure there are
others. If my mother, the queen of proverbs, were here she’d toss you off a
“where there’s one there are a dozen.” I cringe.

When they begin to lick the butter you left on the counter,
(don’t tell me to get a cat; my daughter’s cat has always preferred licking
butter to catching mice.) and leave their little black rice kernels on the
dinner plates, nibbles on the cracker box and holes in the cornmeal sack – it’s
time to declare war.

We have tried various ways of capturing them including live
trapping with the benevolent plan of releasing them some where wonderful like
the wealthy neighborhood next door. But they just seem to prefer slumming at my
house. The old-fashioned bend-the-spring-back-and-hook trap only succeeded in
trapping my fingers as the latch is so touchy. Mice despise this trap, disarm
it with ease and leave with the bait. They may be cheap, but don’t bother.
Poison is bad for two reasons. If a mouse eats it and dies and your cat finds
it thinking what a yummy little snack, she might eat it and die, too. The
second problem with poison, though some deny this, is that upon eating a
shit-load of bait the mouse makes his way back to his nest somewhere in the
bowels of your house and feeling very sick to the stomach curls up and dies.
Then as nature does her work the mouse begins to decompose. The scent of
rotting flesh emerging from such a small creature is alarming. We know from
experience. That dreadful smell emanating from our basement infused the rest of
the house and lasted until the blue bottle flies appeared (you know what was
going on there!) It could make a monk curse. Slowly it dissipates and
disappears after a few weeks. Meanwhile all our frantic searching in cubby
holes and pipes never revealed the dead corpse.

My secret to fighting mice is simple and cheap. Go to any
hardware store or a place like Menards and purchase four or five JAWZ OF DEATH traps. They should cost
more than five dollars apiece. This is the best weapon ever. You load the
little basin under the trigger with peanut butter, pull back the JAW until it
clicks and carefully set it down. Then scatter a few grains of oatmeal. Not
many. You want it to be an appetizer or an amuse-bouche, a little mouth teaser
as the French say, before the mouse tucks into the main course. Then WHOMP – instant
death. Fast, accurate and deadly. This almost humane, don’t you think? And his
last thought will be a pleasant one – the surprise of finding something so
tasty right in his path on the way to the kitchen? Bonus! Disposal is so easy –
no touching dead thing, just hold over trash can and squeeze open and down it
drops. Most of the time you don’t even need to re-bait.

I know. But he IS dead. Don't feel too sorry for him. Not to put too fine a point on it, The CDC says: "Worldwide, rats and mice spread over 35 diseases. These diseases can be spread to humans directly, through handling of rodents, through contact with rodent feces, urine, or saliva, or through rodent bites." Photo Courtesy of Rachel Wilhelm.

With JAWZ in place you can climb down from the safety of
your stool and confidently put away the cast iron skillet you were going to
throw. This is my best advice for autumn. For free. Lucky you.

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For many years we lived in Toad Hall, an old American Gothic Foursquare house named for the mansion in Wind in the Willows although ours wasn’t really a mansion, the kids just thought it was. Now we live in a different home – one more suited to aging with dignity – yes, well, we can hope – The House Between. “Between” because we are living that stage of life between now and what is to come. Sound a little macabre? It’s not. We needed move to a space with main floor accessibility for older people who may not always be able to climb stairs to sleep and eliminate. We love this home in a quiet neighborhood with offices overooking the wooded ravine behind where we feed birds and watch coyotes play leap frog. We love knowing, too, that this is not our final place – there is more healing and goodness in the next life. I’ve kept the name of my blog toadsdrinkcoffee because I don’t know how to migrate to a new one. The name is now even more obscure, but it had to do with living in Toad Hall and my addiction to coffee. However, I did migrate my old publication – Notes From Toad Hall– to the new one Letters from the House Between.